k atm I'm 99% certain that this is purely hardware (and maybe 1% that some bad software) for these reasons:
- All games installed in my other laptop and tablet (both are inferior to the desktop and much older) are able to run the games 100% problems free
- All games currently installed in this desktop has the identical lag problem (begins smoothly/ hyper speed, lag lag lag, returns smoothly/ hyper speed)
- All games when lagging have SYSTEM popping up in the TaskManager followed by some CPU spiking
Games that I've tried are: Dawn of War - Dark Crusade, Voyage Century Online, Caesar IV
Things that I've done hoping to solve this problem:
- reinstalled NVIDIA driver using newest version provided by company site
- run anti-spyware, greyware, malware etc. with NOD32, ThreatFire, Xoftspy (returns 0)
- running the games with ALL defense softwares turned off
- updating directX to most recent version 9.0c
- restarting computer
and of course none of them worked
